Innocent man awaits Mike Pence's pardon for Elkhart crime
Victim, prosecutor want conviction erased
As Mike Pence cultivates a national image as Donald Trump’s running mate, abandoning a re-election bid for a second term as Indiana governor in the process, he may leave unanswered a historic pardon request involving the wrongful conviction of an Illinois man.
It’s been more than two years since the Indiana Parole Board recommended to Pence the pardon of Keith Cooper for a brutal armed robbery 20 years ago.
Though Indiana governors have long used their pardon powers for those they think have earned it, legal experts say Cooper, if successful, would be the first they can recall exonerated in the state through a gubernatorial pardon based on innocence.
Cooper, 49, watched Wednesday from his Country Club Hills home as Pence introduced himself to a national television audience during a 30-minute speech highlighting his conservative Midwestern values at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Cooper said he couldn’t help but wonder — what about me?
“He had the power to do what was right and pardon me — an innocent man — and he hasn’t,” said Cooper, a forklift operator.
“Listening to Pence’s speech angered me,” he continued. “Hearing him say, ‘That we are, as we have always been, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’
“Does that apply to me?”
Anatomy of a wrongful conviction
Cooper one morning walked a few blocks to the local mini-mart to pick up groceries for his family. He can still recite what was in the bag: corn flakes, bacon, eggs, milk, cigarettes and a newspaper. On the way home, a squad car pulled up, and he was arrested.
“I left my family to go to the store to buy them breakfast, and I never returned back to them,” he said.
Police said Cooper matched the description of a man wanted for an attempted purse snatching. He sat in jail for two months, unable to make bail. While there, an Elkhart detective asked him about an Oct. 29, 1996, robbery in the apartment complex where he lived.
On that date, Michael Kershner said, he was watching a movie with friends in his mother’s apartment when two armed men forced their way inside and demanded dope and cash. Kershner, 17, was shot in the stomach. The shooter fled, leaving behind his hat.
A man named Chris Parish was charged after the victims identified him in a photo lineup. But police still were looking for the shooter, whom witnesses described as a tall, thin black man.
Cooper was tall, thin and black.
The lead detective, Stephen Rezutko, wrote in a Jan. 30, 1997, report that he spotted Cooper at the police station weeks earlier in the purse case and thought he resembled a police sketch of the suspect.
Cooper denied involvement in both crimes and voluntarily gave a DNA sample. A jury acquitted him of the attempted robbery involving the purse on March 6, 1997, but, as he prepared to leave the jail, he learned his legal troubles weren’t over.
That same day, prosecutors charged him with attempted murder and robbery. He was later convicted and sentenced to 40 years.
The Indiana Court of Appeals overturned his co-defendant Parish’s conviction in 2005, and Cooper was given the choice of being set free with the felony conviction on his record or facing a new trial before the same judge.
The Chicago native chose to go home to his wife and three children, who were 8, 6 and nearly 2 when he lost his freedom and who at times were homeless during his nearly decadelong incarceration. Cooper said he does not regret his decision, but living with the felony conviction on his record has stunted his ability to earn a better living and truly clear his name.
Two years after Cooper’s release from prison, a recent college graduate named Elliot Slosar who was working on the co-defendant’s lawsuit soon began researching Cooper’s case, as well.
Slosar, now an attorney with Loevy & Loevy in Chicago, argues that Cooper was wrongly imprisoned based on flawed police work, tainted witness identifications, an unreliable jailhouse snitch and a trial attorney who mishandled key DNA evidence. The victim, witnesses and the snitch later recanted.
Even the original trial prosecutor who secured Cooper’s conviction is urging Pence to support the pardon.
“Justice demands that Mr. Cooper be pardoned,” attorney Michael A. Christofeno, now in private practice, wrote in a January 2016 letter to Pence obtained by the Tribune. “We cannot undo the wrongful imprisonment of Mr. Cooper, but we can undo his wrongful conviction with a pardon.”
After he found him, Slosar told Cooper that Michael Kershner and his mother, Nona Canell, recanted when learning about the DNA evidence and identifying photos of two men actually implicated by the DNA evidence. Other witnesses in the apartment the night of the robbery who Slosar tracked down also signed affidavits recanting their trial testimonies against Cooper.
Three years after Slosar and Cooper filed the petition for a pardon, the Indiana parole board heard their case. Canell traveled from Kentucky to support them. Her son wasn’t with her, but board members watched his six-minute video plea urging them to correct his mistake.
He and Canell insist Rezutko pressured them into making a positive identification when they were uneasy.
“I kept asking (Rezutko) how do you know and he said, ‘cause we did our job,’” Canell said. “I was angry because my son almost died ... and I thought they did their job, so I believed them. They didn’t even tell us they had DNA. I just had more faith in the system.”
She turned to Cooper during the hearing, seated feet away, and tearfully said, “I’m so sorry.” The two hugged and, earlier in the day, posed for a photograph Slosar said he still keeps on his desk.
“I think about getting them justice every day,” Slosar said.
Rezutko did not respond to Tribune requests for comment. The 32-year veteran resigned from the Elkhart Police Department in October 2001, “after the chief of police informed him that there was an investigation into his conduct, unrelated to the (Kershner) investigation,” according to evidence at Parish’s 2010 federal civil rights trial.
He defended his work during several hours of trial testimony and in an earlier deposition.
Rezutko has never been disciplined for alleged misconduct related to his work, his attorneys said.
“I did not rush to judgment in this case,” Rezutko responded in Parish’s civil proceedings.
Long odds
Pence has pardoned three people since he became governor in 2013. His predecessor, Republican former Gov. Mitch Daniels, pardoned more than 60 people during his eight years in office.
Given the Trump-Pence ticket’s “Make America Safe Again” theme, delivered amid a difficult time of violence and unrest nationwide with police shootings and racial tensions, political pundits say granting a pardon — even one based on actual innocence — may be tricky.
Bruce Haynes, founding partner and president of Purple Strategies, a Washington-based bipartisan communications consulting firm, said it’s unlikely that Pence will make a move before the November election. It would be more of a distraction to Trump’s presidential campaign than actual political gain, Haynes said, and because Cooper is a free man anyway, there’s no harm in waiting.
“If you’re Pence, you could say I can wait a few more months and make that decision after the election and, in the meantime, I’m not (affecting) this man in any significant way.”
He added, “You can’t steal the spotlight from the presidential nominee, in particular when it’s Donald Trump. ... That would be a cardinal sin for a vice presidential nominee.”
The topic of pardons and clemency can be controversial. Candidates don’t want to be perceived as too lenient and may fear the recipient could commit future crimes.
But, on the other side, being too tough also may have pitfalls. Reporters during George W. Bush’s first presidential run pored over several controversial executions carried out while he was Texas governor.
Gov. Rick Perry presided over more than 200 executions in 14 years in Texas. Questions over one execution in particular — the notorious arson case in which Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted, in part through disproved forensics, of killing his three children — persisted during both of Perry’s failed presidential runs.
Though Trump, a billionaire businessman who has never held public office, hasn’t been faced with the decision to grant a pardon or clemency, he has offered opinions.
Take the infamous case involving the rape of a white Central Park jogger in 1989. Five young men — all black or Latino — were convicted. Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the restoration of New York’s death penalty.
The men, though, eventually were cleared and reached a $41 million wrongful conviction settlement. Trump called the 2014 payout “a disgrace” in a newspaper op-ed piece.
Fran Watson, a clinical professor of law at Indiana University McKinney School of Law, who directs a wrongful conviction clinic, said she wouldn’t bet on the socially conservative Pence making the move to pardon Cooper, especially while in the national spotlight.
“I think the governor deserves his reputation for being tough on crime, which means he doesn’t lend an ear to someone convicted of (charges related to) an attempted murder,” she said. “One would think under these circumstances — where even the prosecution and victim and their family are saying you got the wrong man — it would be a bit of a given. He’s got this really good opportunity to do what is right without anyone objecting.”
Despite the parole board’s unanimous recommendation in March 2011 that Pence grant Cooper a pardon, the governor has not acted.
“The request for Keith Cooper is still under review,” said Stephanie Hodgin, the governor’s spokeswoman. “It has not been approved or denied.”
Cooper’s case is indicative of the times, Slosar said.
“It will be extraordinary if Gov. Pence uses his executive power to pardon Keith, an innocent black man, while a national conversation occurs regarding the interplay between race and the criminal justice system,” Slosar said.
Ironically, Cooper said he had moved his family from Chicago to the small Indiana town just months before the crime because he wanted to escape the city’s violence and find a better job.
Cooper said some good did come from his time in prison. He went from being a high school dropout to, while in prison, receiving his GED, associate’s degree and certificates of achievement in hospice care and prison ministry. He has since remarried and is a doting grandfather.
Cooper said he suspects his pardon request will be left unanswered before the governor leaves office. Still, he said, he won’t give up.
“Never,” he said. “I’m not a quitter. I didn’t give up in prison and I’m sure not going to give up now.”
Victim, prosecutor want conviction erased
As Mike Pence cultivates a national image as Donald Trump’s running mate, abandoning a re-election bid for a second term as Indiana governor in the process, he may leave unanswered a historic pardon request involving the wrongful conviction of an Illinois man.
It’s been more than two years since the Indiana Parole Board recommended to Pence the pardon of Keith Cooper for a brutal armed robbery 20 years ago.
Though Indiana governors have long used their pardon powers for those they think have earned it, legal experts say Cooper, if successful, would be the first they can recall exonerated in the state through a gubernatorial pardon based on innocence.
Cooper, 49, watched Wednesday from his Country Club Hills home as Pence introduced himself to a national television audience during a 30-minute speech highlighting his conservative Midwestern values at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Cooper said he couldn’t help but wonder — what about me?
“He had the power to do what was right and pardon me — an innocent man — and he hasn’t,” said Cooper, a forklift operator.
“Listening to Pence’s speech angered me,” he continued. “Hearing him say, ‘That we are, as we have always been, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’
“Does that apply to me?”
Anatomy of a wrongful conviction
Cooper one morning walked a few blocks to the local mini-mart to pick up groceries for his family. He can still recite what was in the bag: corn flakes, bacon, eggs, milk, cigarettes and a newspaper. On the way home, a squad car pulled up, and he was arrested.
“I left my family to go to the store to buy them breakfast, and I never returned back to them,” he said.
Police said Cooper matched the description of a man wanted for an attempted purse snatching. He sat in jail for two months, unable to make bail. While there, an Elkhart detective asked him about an Oct. 29, 1996, robbery in the apartment complex where he lived.
On that date, Michael Kershner said, he was watching a movie with friends in his mother’s apartment when two armed men forced their way inside and demanded dope and cash. Kershner, 17, was shot in the stomach. The shooter fled, leaving behind his hat.
A man named Chris Parish was charged after the victims identified him in a photo lineup. But police still were looking for the shooter, whom witnesses described as a tall, thin black man.
Cooper was tall, thin and black.
The lead detective, Stephen Rezutko, wrote in a Jan. 30, 1997, report that he spotted Cooper at the police station weeks earlier in the purse case and thought he resembled a police sketch of the suspect.
Cooper denied involvement in both crimes and voluntarily gave a DNA sample. A jury acquitted him of the attempted robbery involving the purse on March 6, 1997, but, as he prepared to leave the jail, he learned his legal troubles weren’t over.
That same day, prosecutors charged him with attempted murder and robbery. He was later convicted and sentenced to 40 years.
The Indiana Court of Appeals overturned his co-defendant Parish’s conviction in 2005, and Cooper was given the choice of being set free with the felony conviction on his record or facing a new trial before the same judge.
The Chicago native chose to go home to his wife and three children, who were 8, 6 and nearly 2 when he lost his freedom and who at times were homeless during his nearly decadelong incarceration. Cooper said he does not regret his decision, but living with the felony conviction on his record has stunted his ability to earn a better living and truly clear his name.
Two years after Cooper’s release from prison, a recent college graduate named Elliot Slosar who was working on the co-defendant’s lawsuit soon began researching Cooper’s case, as well.
Slosar, now an attorney with Loevy & Loevy in Chicago, argues that Cooper was wrongly imprisoned based on flawed police work, tainted witness identifications, an unreliable jailhouse snitch and a trial attorney who mishandled key DNA evidence. The victim, witnesses and the snitch later recanted.
Even the original trial prosecutor who secured Cooper’s conviction is urging Pence to support the pardon.
“Justice demands that Mr. Cooper be pardoned,” attorney Michael A. Christofeno, now in private practice, wrote in a January 2016 letter to Pence obtained by the Tribune. “We cannot undo the wrongful imprisonment of Mr. Cooper, but we can undo his wrongful conviction with a pardon.”
After he found him, Slosar told Cooper that Michael Kershner and his mother, Nona Canell, recanted when learning about the DNA evidence and identifying photos of two men actually implicated by the DNA evidence. Other witnesses in the apartment the night of the robbery who Slosar tracked down also signed affidavits recanting their trial testimonies against Cooper.
Three years after Slosar and Cooper filed the petition for a pardon, the Indiana parole board heard their case. Canell traveled from Kentucky to support them. Her son wasn’t with her, but board members watched his six-minute video plea urging them to correct his mistake.
He and Canell insist Rezutko pressured them into making a positive identification when they were uneasy.
“I kept asking (Rezutko) how do you know and he said, ‘cause we did our job,’” Canell said. “I was angry because my son almost died ... and I thought they did their job, so I believed them. They didn’t even tell us they had DNA. I just had more faith in the system.”
She turned to Cooper during the hearing, seated feet away, and tearfully said, “I’m so sorry.” The two hugged and, earlier in the day, posed for a photograph Slosar said he still keeps on his desk.
“I think about getting them justice every day,” Slosar said.
Rezutko did not respond to Tribune requests for comment. The 32-year veteran resigned from the Elkhart Police Department in October 2001, “after the chief of police informed him that there was an investigation into his conduct, unrelated to the (Kershner) investigation,” according to evidence at Parish’s 2010 federal civil rights trial.
He defended his work during several hours of trial testimony and in an earlier deposition.
Rezutko has never been disciplined for alleged misconduct related to his work, his attorneys said.
“I did not rush to judgment in this case,” Rezutko responded in Parish’s civil proceedings.
Long odds
Pence has pardoned three people since he became governor in 2013. His predecessor, Republican former Gov. Mitch Daniels, pardoned more than 60 people during his eight years in office.
Given the Trump-Pence ticket’s “Make America Safe Again” theme, delivered amid a difficult time of violence and unrest nationwide with police shootings and racial tensions, political pundits say granting a pardon — even one based on actual innocence — may be tricky.
Bruce Haynes, founding partner and president of Purple Strategies, a Washington-based bipartisan communications consulting firm, said it’s unlikely that Pence will make a move before the November election. It would be more of a distraction to Trump’s presidential campaign than actual political gain, Haynes said, and because Cooper is a free man anyway, there’s no harm in waiting.
“If you’re Pence, you could say I can wait a few more months and make that decision after the election and, in the meantime, I’m not (affecting) this man in any significant way.”
He added, “You can’t steal the spotlight from the presidential nominee, in particular when it’s Donald Trump. ... That would be a cardinal sin for a vice presidential nominee.”
The topic of pardons and clemency can be controversial. Candidates don’t want to be perceived as too lenient and may fear the recipient could commit future crimes.
But, on the other side, being too tough also may have pitfalls. Reporters during George W. Bush’s first presidential run pored over several controversial executions carried out while he was Texas governor.
Gov. Rick Perry presided over more than 200 executions in 14 years in Texas. Questions over one execution in particular — the notorious arson case in which Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted, in part through disproved forensics, of killing his three children — persisted during both of Perry’s failed presidential runs.
Though Trump, a billionaire businessman who has never held public office, hasn’t been faced with the decision to grant a pardon or clemency, he has offered opinions.
Take the infamous case involving the rape of a white Central Park jogger in 1989. Five young men — all black or Latino — were convicted. Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the restoration of New York’s death penalty.
The men, though, eventually were cleared and reached a $41 million wrongful conviction settlement. Trump called the 2014 payout “a disgrace” in a newspaper op-ed piece.
Fran Watson, a clinical professor of law at Indiana University McKinney School of Law, who directs a wrongful conviction clinic, said she wouldn’t bet on the socially conservative Pence making the move to pardon Cooper, especially while in the national spotlight.
“I think the governor deserves his reputation for being tough on crime, which means he doesn’t lend an ear to someone convicted of (charges related to) an attempted murder,” she said. “One would think under these circumstances — where even the prosecution and victim and their family are saying you got the wrong man — it would be a bit of a given. He’s got this really good opportunity to do what is right without anyone objecting.”
Despite the parole board’s unanimous recommendation in March 2011 that Pence grant Cooper a pardon, the governor has not acted.
“The request for Keith Cooper is still under review,” said Stephanie Hodgin, the governor’s spokeswoman. “It has not been approved or denied.”
Cooper’s case is indicative of the times, Slosar said.
“It will be extraordinary if Gov. Pence uses his executive power to pardon Keith, an innocent black man, while a national conversation occurs regarding the interplay between race and the criminal justice system,” Slosar said.
Ironically, Cooper said he had moved his family from Chicago to the small Indiana town just months before the crime because he wanted to escape the city’s violence and find a better job.
Cooper said some good did come from his time in prison. He went from being a high school dropout to, while in prison, receiving his GED, associate’s degree and certificates of achievement in hospice care and prison ministry. He has since remarried and is a doting grandfather.
Cooper said he suspects his pardon request will be left unanswered before the governor leaves office. Still, he said, he won’t give up.
“Never,” he said. “I’m not a quitter. I didn’t give up in prison and I’m sure not going to give up now.”
